Sunday, March 10, 2013

Sweden is a country that plans
ahead. Whether it’s arranging a coffee date with a friend at least several days in advance or crafting a Saturday schedule
around Systembolaget’s early-afternoon close, not many activities are
spontaneous here.

Planning even extends to doing
laundry, which took me a lot of getting used to when I rented my first Swedish apartment.

Laundry is serious business in
Sweden. If you fail to clean out a dryer’s lint filter, spill detergent on top
of a washer or encroach a few minutes into someone’s pre-booked time, there will be a dispute.
Some arguments have escalated to the point they’ve actually landed people in prison.

Like most complexes in the
U.S., Swedish apartment buildings have communal laundry facilities. Unlike U.S.
complexes, though, you have to book a time — sometimes many days in advance —
and stick to it.

I suppose there are some
advantages to planned laundry. You know you’ll have the washers and dryers all
to yourself for a specific duration, and at least here I don’t need to
stockpile coins the way I used to in California apartment complexes. I just
still find it a little annoying and sometimes downright inconvenient to have to
schedule my laundry so specifically.

In some apartment buildings,
like the first one we lived in, you book via a paper list. Small buildings like
that one in Falköpingusually
have slots per day of at least several hours.

Our new building in Stockholm
houses the facility for several in the neighborhood, so there are a lot more
people using it on a regular basis. For each of the two washers and dryers,
there is a metal board of dates and times with 2.5-hour slots between 7 a.m.
and 10 p.m.

And don’t even think of trying to clean clothes after hours. The rather blunt sign below is posted in our facility and I hear some facilities’ power
even shuts off automatically at night.

“Other times, it is absolutely forbidden to use any
machine. Think of your neighbors close to the laundry room and accept this.”

Each apartment has a numbered
lock and you can put it in any open slot to book the time, so you can obviously
only book one 2.5-hour slot at a time — which is as challenging as it sounds.
You can only do laundry spontaneously if nobody has booked a slot or if they
haven’t started washing within 30 minutes of the start of their time.

Our facility has two “stations”
and each one features a tumble dryer and a drying cabinet. Maybe the most annoying thing
about doing laundry here, though, is that the washers don’t have built-in
centrifuges. That means clothes come out sopping wet and you need to put them
in a standalone spinner for five minutes per load.

That adds an extra 10
minutes you have to be in the laundry room to facilitate the transfer process
from washer to dryer. I guess in theory the specialized centrifuge cycle means
the clothes would require less drying time, but it’s still inconvenient.

Laundry is a chore few people
enjoy, and it’s even less enjoyable when it must be planned so precisely.